Saturday, December 07, 2019

Cockles

Success! I drove over to a nearby town that has its market on Fridays. The market at Montrichard is bigger than Saint-Aignan's Saturday market. I remembered that they had two fish mongers. I was disappointed to see that neither of them had much shellfish. Just mussels and some oysters. As I gave up and headed back to the car, I noticed a third fish monger. His stand was smaller than the other two, but lo!, he had coques (cockles). I got a kilo.

Having linguini with white clam (cockle) sauce between Thanksgiving and Christmas has become a kind of tradition for us.

When I got them home, Ken put the little bivalves in a pot of salty water with cornmeal for a couple of hours so they could purge their systems of sand (and other stuff) before he cooked them. When it was time, he sweated onion and garlic in olive oil, added the cockles and some white wine, and let them steam open while the linguini cooked. When the pasta was done, we added it into the pan with the cockles, sprinkled on some fresh chopped parsley, and lunch was served.

5 comments:

  1. Very popular with some of our local friends, but too much work (to eat) for me — not enough return. I do love the look though.

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  2. Didn't have time yesterday, but your picture there is soooo beautiful, Walt. Thank you for sharing it with us!

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  3. mitch, they mostly fall out of the shells when they're cooked, so the real work is moving the empty shells from the serving bowl to the "shell" bowl.

    elgee, thank you!

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  4. Used to be a big thing in (at least) London on a Saturday afternoon, to get some prepared cockles from a stall (or even, way back, from an itinerant vendor with a barrow); but though they used to be in my supermarket, they seem to have disappeared, both the fresh and the pickled ones in jars.

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  5. wow I have never seen any until now.

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